Kudos to WGBH

Here's a news release forwarded to me by David Faucheux:

Boston, September 20, 2006- WGBH's MoPix® system has won a prestigious da Vinci Award in recognition of the patented system's ability to make first-run movies and theaters accessible to patrons with vision or hearing loss.

To be presented September 29 by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society of Michigan, the da Vinci Awards honor exceptional design and engineering achievements in accessibility and universal design that empowers people of all disabilities.

Hadley China

Thursday morning at 10:00a CDT, the Hadley School for the Blind presented a seminar about its operations in China. Talking Communities provided the software which ran the seminar. The audio snip that I put up discussed travel in Hong Kong.

I plan to do a segment on a course I am taking with Hadley now called The Art of Ancient Egypt.

IMAGINE That!

In Memoriam

On that fateful morning, I was dealing with the bureaucracy that handles the government's social service safety net. My mother called and told me to turn the TV on---and what a shock. The coverage lasted all day. Sometimes, I think it's worse when the media sit there and leaves the cameras on and strain to fill each pause with verbal commentary, chatter, especially at such times when they don't know anything yet.

CNN has put together a special memorial site for those who died on 9/11. The memorial puts the events into perspective, giving you a personal glimpse of the victims. The tribute is heart wrenching.

www.cnn.com

I hope the world of the 21st century is not like that of the future civilization depicted in RC 27310, Star Griffin, a dark parody crammed with chaotic violence and rage.

REFLECT on That!

Target, Part II

Bull's Eye: Target not on target with web accessibility

This item stretches over two posts.

It is not as cleaned up and polished as I'd have liked, but the blogging service has no rewind feature or pause feature. So I do the best I can without spending hours on the telephone recording audio content!

Today's posts concern web accessibility. I have found many websites to be tedious to use. Not necessarily inaccessible, but tedious. One is Wikipedia. I access it thru another site because the interface is simpler.

Amazon gives me fits because there is so much information on the screen and I have to use any number of shortcuts to attempt to get to the part of the page that has the information, often audio clips of CDs.

I have long wanted to use Match or True.com but hesitate because they seem intimidating.

I have been known to use Info Eyes to find something online that would simply take me entirely too long. I get very mentally fatigued sitting running thru websites, visiting links, and then remembering where I went.

Footnotes:

1. Law firms mentioned in the blogcast are as follows:

Disability Rights Advocates

Brown, Goldstein and Levy

Schneider and Wallace

2. Use of honorific academic titles.

I am given to understand that NFB head, Marc Maurer, who holds a law degree from Notre Dame, was awarded an honorary doctorate by a Northern California college. I seem to recall a mention of this in an issue of the Braille Monitor in the mid 1990s. I had always heard that those with honorary doctorates did not affix the title Dr. to their name; the title Dr. being reserved to those who pursued the Ph.D., MD, ND, OD, DVM, DDS., Ed.D., ... His immediate predecessor may have set the fashion. Wonder why?

3. Capitalization.

When a sentence begins with a website url, does one capitalize the first w? ex. www.loc.gov/nls contains bibliographic information on recorded books. or Www.loc.gov/nls contains bibliographic information on recorded books.

4. Fanfold Braille embosser paper.

Help! Can someone out there develop a Braille embosser that does not need to use fanfold, tractor feed paper? It drives me crazy. The separating of each sheet and the removing of the tractor feed strips causes me to often damage my printouts.

5. Comparison of efficiency of computer use between sighted and blind populations.

The article concluded with the following quote from Bruce Sexton, "I believe that millions of blind people like me can use the Internet just as easily as do the sighted, if websites are accessible." Seems like so many sites are getting more and more GUI and visual.

Beverley, C.A., Bath, P.A. & Barber, R. The Information
Behaviour of Visually Impaired People. JDOC Information Behaviour
special issue. In press

Parsons School of Design teacher, Manuel Lima, has constructed striking images that represent complexity....

6. Speaking of things Kurzweil, after reading Fantastic Voyage RC (59967) and beginning The Singularity Is Near (RC 61318), I wonder if medicine thru nanotech and genetic recoding will in the next decade or two make blindness vanish relegating it to books dealing with the history of disability.

7. NFB also pursued legal actions several years ago to force AOL to make its software blind-friendly.

8. One wonders if the verdict will be appealed by Target--Corporations usually appeal. Target has had every year in December a day set aside for the disabled to go and shop there without the hastle of other shoppers during the Christmas rush. Seems like there is a disconnect between the corporation's website policy and that of its physical stores. I sometimes think all this PC and multiculturalism has fragmented our society beyond repair. Seems like Arthur Schlessinger Jr. wrote a book about that in the early 90s.

IMAGINE That!

Brandalism, anyone?

Had you ever thought a computer game could be a form of disobedience? Well, click the audio link and learn more. The article I mention cites a professor, Ian Bogost, at GIT (Georgia Institute of Technology), and a law professor, Sonia Katyal, at Fordham.

I dislike logos of any kind. I am sick of them. They feel ugly. For instance, I'd love to have combined the uppers of the NewBalance 991 shoes, the nice suede and mesh with the air sole cushioning of Reeboks. But I'd want to strip all the stupid logos. Often, the thing bought is of no more intrinsic worth than an unlogoed item. I once read that certain upper- class girls used to buy Calvin Klein jeans and use embroidery scissors to remove the stupid label running across the back pocket. Neat idea. I still have one pair of jeans from my early college days and they do have that stupid label. Luckily, the rivets have not popped off this pair, as happened to several of my other pairs.

IMAGINE that!